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Friday, May 19, 2017

An Antarctic Quickening: Can Winter Save Runaway Melt?

Early-Stage Antarctica Death Rattle Sparks NY Times Journalists Trip

As NY Times journalists fly to Antarctica with scientists to examine cascading ice sheets, it’s worth looking into their level of curiosity because that’s not a normal occurrence. After all, who can possibly be interested in ice sheets a couple of miles thick where it’s cold and icy 9,000 miles away?

Here’s why the high level of interest: Antarctica is equivalent to 200’ of seawater rise, and it appears to be coming apart at the seams in some very vulnerable areas.

The NY journalists, after all, are from a city that will be under water in the worse case scenario, and telltale signs of big trouble are already way too evident, certainly evident enough to move NY journalists off their butts to travel 9,000 miles to visit the massive ice sheet.

It’s Global Warming at work!

Upfront, the conclusion to this article: When it comes to Global Warming, the USA has the wrong people in the White House and Congress, which may be the understatement of the decade… rather of the century, assuming we all make it that far, which is looking more and more doubtful.

The NY Times’ article Miles of Ice Collapsing into the Sea d/d May 18, 2017 actually shows the ice flow, which is extremely intriguing: written by Justin Gillis with maps and graphics by Derek Watkins and Jeremy White and photographs by Jonathan Corum and video by Evan Grothjan and Graham Roberts and additional production by Larry Buchanan and Rumsey Taylor. Add an email address at the foot of the NY Times article to receive their in-depth journalism about climate change around the world. It’s a wonderful fulfilling experience.

As stated by the journalists, they traveled to Antarctica to see how the vast ice sheet might affect the world. Without hesitation, the answer to their query is as follows: It will change life horribly forevermore.

Daydreaming… If only America took the lead against CO2 emissions at Kyoto Protocol (1997) and insisted upon conversion to renewables, similar to how Congress authorized 100% solar power on the International Space Station (yr. 2000) for our astronauts (but no such effort for the country at large), as well as taking other remedial steps like whitening commercial rooftops, and consciously cutting back CO2 emissions at utility power sources, etc., the world might not be in such a dangerous pickle today. As it happens, too many US politicians reject the science, deniers of climate change. They are many, too many.

Hopefully, it is not too late at this late date because climate change/global warming is on a virtual rip-snorting stretch turbocharged and bloody dangerous beyond anyone’s imagination! It’s happening so fast that it’s ahead of science by miles and miles.

Here’s living proof as witnessed by NY Times journalists:

“The acceleration is making some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration,” Ibid.

According to the scientists on the trip, here’s the danger: If greenhouses gases (GHG) like CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels, like oil and coal, continue at today’s high levels, parts of Antarctica could break up rapidly with a resultant 6’ of sea level rise by the end of this century, which is double the maximum increase projected by the international panel only four years ago.

But wait, there is more: Those forecasts of four years ago are described “as crude” even by the researchers who created them.

“We could be decades too fast, or decades too slow,’ said one of them, Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,” Ibid.

What if they are decades too slow or too fast?

Whichever, the bad case means all hell is going to break lose any time now within decades, or roughly, 2025-to-2075 as a guess. Whoops, that seems to put present day generations smack dab in line of fire, or rather in way too much water overflowing city levees.

“Remote as Antarctica may seem, every person in the world… is contributing to the emissions that put the frozen continent at risk. If those emissions continue unchecked and the world is allowed to heat up enough, scientists have no doubt that large parts of Antarctica will melt into the sea,” Ibid.

“No doubt that large parts of Antarctica will melt into the sea” is the curse of global warming, and it does not take a brain surgeon to figure out that it results in the end of civilization, as we know it.

Based upon not only the Ross Ice Shelf that the journalists visited, but also Pine Island Glacier, which scientists have already determined is irreversibly cascading, it really appears the worst case may be under way now. It’s only too obvious that’s why the NY journalists traveled there in the first place. After all, they didn’t travel 9,000 miles to see stable ice!

Disastrous breaking news out of Alaska: The following is a synopsis (quotation) of a horrifying scientific release d/d May 11, 2017:

“The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires). That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the US commercial sector in a single year.”

“The chief reason for the greater CO2 release was that as Alaska has warmed up, emissions from once frozen tundra in winter are increasing – presumably because the ground is not refreezing as quickly. Now what? Sit in a circle and hold hands, or get to work to find what (if any) options we’ve got?”

That’s Global Warming!

That is horrific news. It now appears that nature is cooperating in a positive feedback loop (which is extremely negative, as it is nature operating hands-free on auto pilot) in harmony with humans, overflowing the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. That’s a perfect script for an end of the world apocalypse film project.

And, it is happening right now!

Not tomorrow or in another decade. It’s happening now, as of today. And, how about Siberia, which is much more vast and riddled with wildly out of control methane (CH4) release, the deadly twin sister to CO2?

“Russian scientists recently discovered 7,000 earthen knobs erupting from the Siberian Arctic, each the size of a small hill. It was as though the permafrost had broken out into giant grass-covered mounds. What’s more, an unknown number of these bubbles could contain methane and explode, forming craters, the Siberian Times reported…

It’s definitely related to warming, Romanovsky said. If these solid chunks warm up and decompose — and the Arctic region is heating up at a rate double the rest of the planet” (Ben Guarino, Russian Scientists Find 7,000 Siberian Hills Possibly Filled with Explosive Gas, The Washington Post, March 27, 2017.

Global warming is up to its dirty work in Siberia, where enough methane is stored in permafrost over millennia to toss the world into a massive self-feeding global warming super cycle that literally scorches world agriculture to a standstill. What then?

Maybe Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) would be willing to take a field trip, since it’s also happening in his state of Alaska, to give a personal assessment to the American people and to the US Senate. Here’s his quote about global warming:

“With 7 billion humans on earth, there is likely some impact on nature. The last few years clearly show, though, that there is no concrete scientific consensus on the extent to which humans contribute to climate change.”